Gallery Editor’s Note

Gallery Editor’s Note
Dunaway, Finis
2018-01-01 00:00:00
Finis Dunaway In many communities, historical markers are ubiquitous. Appearing on roadsides and in public spaces, they boast a distinctive style and shape; their recognizable lettering and logos beseech spectators to pause and reﬂect on what happened in this place. In this issue’s Gallery essay, Christine DeLucia shows why these markers should matter to environmental historians. DeLucia takes us to Concord, Massachusetts, and looks closely at a sign constructed in 1930 to commemorate the site of an “Indian ﬁshing weir.” She asks what visions of landscape history the sign records and what forms of knowledge and place-making it overlooks. She considers a diverse ar- ray of visual and literary sources—from seventeenth-century Puritan imagery and colonial cartography to nineteenth-century writings of Emerson and Thoreau and twentieth-century pictorial maps—to ex- plain how “Musketaquid,” an Algonquian toponym, became incorpo- rated into the sign’s interpretive message. For DeLucia, such markers are not bland or neutral portrayals of the past but “environmental tools of colonial persuasion.” Her focus on landscape and memory in Concord illuminates broader questions related to settler colonialism, past and present Indigenous struggles, and the uses of environmental history. V The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Finis Dunaway, “Gallery Editor’s Note,” Environmental History 23 (2018): 183 doi: 10.1093/envhis/emx125 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article-abstract/23/1/183/4743644 by guest on 16 March 2018
http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.pngEnvironmental HistoryOxford University Presshttp://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/gallery-editor-s-note-730QdwU2pn

Abstract

Finis Dunaway In many communities, historical markers are ubiquitous. Appearing on roadsides and in public spaces, they boast a distinctive style and shape; their recognizable lettering and logos beseech spectators to pause and reﬂect on what happened in this place. In this issue’s Gallery essay, Christine DeLucia shows why these markers should matter to environmental historians. DeLucia takes us to Concord, Massachusetts, and looks closely at a sign constructed in 1930 to commemorate the site of an “Indian ﬁshing weir.” She asks what visions of landscape history the sign records and what forms of knowledge and place-making it overlooks. She considers a diverse ar- ray of visual and literary sources—from seventeenth-century Puritan imagery and colonial cartography to nineteenth-century writings of Emerson and Thoreau and twentieth-century pictorial maps—to ex- plain how “Musketaquid,” an Algonquian toponym, became incorpo- rated into the sign’s interpretive message. For DeLucia, such markers are not bland or neutral portrayals of the past but “environmental tools of colonial persuasion.” Her focus on landscape and memory in Concord illuminates broader questions related to settler colonialism, past and present Indigenous struggles, and the uses of environmental history. V The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Finis Dunaway, “Gallery Editor’s Note,” Environmental History 23 (2018): 183 doi: 10.1093/envhis/emx125 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article-abstract/23/1/183/4743644 by guest on 16 March 2018